10 replies to this topic

[Thcucolate]

Hey, it strikes me that right now, firing weapons in sequence really does not work how you would expect. If you alpha strike you get the multiple weapons of same time nerf, yes? OK, OK I get, it, DONT alpha strike. Sure, so chain fire it is instead....

But, when I chain fire, what seems to happen especially with very fast turnaround weapons such as the AC2 is that the weapons do not fire at their full potential. What do I mean? Well, right now an AC2 is ready to fire in 0.62 seconds. So, I have a Jagger Mech with 6 cannon mounts. I filled these with 5 AC2, firing in sequence I found...

5 AC Fired in sequence, all 5 canons fired = 2.95 seconds.

or

0.59 seconds per AC fired.

Considering I was timing this by hand, with a stopwatch, then lets round that up to 0.65 per AC2. And that's where the wheels fell off my expectation cart. Because to me, it looks like EACH AC2 is waiting the full 0.65 of the previous cannon fired, to fire in turn. This is wrong...

If I have 5 AC2, chain fire should work like this...

Fire AC2 No.1, it will now take 0.62 seconds to recycle and be ready to fire once more
Fire AC2 No.2, 0.124 seconds after first, it has 0.62 to cycle
Fire AC2 No.3 0.124 seconds later
Fire AC2 No.4 0.124 seconds later
Fire AC2 No.5 0.124 seconds later

0.124 seconds later, AC2 No.1 is ready to fire one more and does so, and we can repeat this cycle until we overheat or run out of ammo, or whatever.

This would give me roughly 8 shots per second in this config, rather than the pretty lame 1.4 that I have right now.

Lets look at this further. Right now, I can so no reason whatsoever to buy more than one AC2, other that alpha striking them, which is nerfed. Why, well, when you add more AC2, you do not increase your overall rate of fire, and thats bizarre. These weapons have lots of nerfing. They are very heavy, they require ammo that runs out, their ammo can explode etc. So, considering a Jagger Mech has space for 6 cannons, then why would you ever want to do this in the current game design.

Lets compare this to a real world situation. Lets say we look at a WWII era battleship with a number of anti-air craft autocannons mounting. I guess these would be the equivalent of our AC2, not a huge amount of damage, but a very high rate of fire.

Here is an example of some mounted on an air-craft carrier.




In this image, we can see about eight Oerlikon autocannon for air defence. Now, MW as it stands, just ONE of these could be fired in 0.65 seconds, thats the max rate of fire. But in reality, I'm pretty sure if these fellas cycled in 0.65s that you'd have an agregate cycle time of 0.08s or 12 rounds fired per second.

So, you get my point. And this holds for all of the other weapons as well. WHY are weapons waiting for others of their type to cycle, when they should in fact be firing in a much tighter timeline?

[Firelizard]

Chain fire works on a .5 second delay or when the previous weapon finishes its firing sequence, whichever is longer. This means weapons like the AC2, which have a sub-second firing rate, will not fire full rate in chain fire.

[Thcucolate]

Firelizard, on 15 June 2014 - 10:12 AM, said:

Chain fire works on a .5 second delay or when the previous weapon finishes its firing sequence, whichever is longer. This means weapons like the AC2, which have a sub-second firing rate, will not fire full rate in chain fire.

Is'nt that kind of what I am saying above? No matter how many AC2 you equip, chain firing them does not increase your fire rate. With 5x AC2 my fire rate should be 8 shells per second, rather than 1.4. More weapons of that type would give a faster overall fire rate. Each AC2 still can only fire at 0.62s, but as each fires in sequence, a much higher overall fire rate should be achievable.

[Ph30nix]

They say this crap is working as intended and has been for months now because instead of having half a brain and just reducing cockpit shake and explosions on AC's they instead decide to gimp they as much as they can and penalize people for chain firing AC/2's with insane ghost heat.

RAGE ON!!!

[Chemistry Warden]

Yeah, the ghost heat penalties for 2! ac/2's is ridiculous.
Unless the ghost heat penalties are going to change, you can't even fire 2 in an alternating firing pattern without running into ghost heat, except if you only fire on cooldown. (ie fire cannon 1, wait for CD, fire cannon 2, wait, etc.). At this point, why even take 2, unless you group fire them?

[Ph30nix]

My god...

6 UAC/2's gets nerfed to hell
but i can run
2 uac/20's and 2 uac/10's with ZERO PROBLEM
12 point alpha vs 60 pnt alpha with same burst potential and which one is made unusable?

[Impyrium]

Ph30nix, on 15 June 2014 - 04:16 PM, said:

My god... 6 UAC/2's gets nerfed to hell but i can run 2 uac/20's and 2 uac/10's with ZERO PROBLEM 12 point alpha vs 60 pnt alpha with same burst potential and which one is made unusable?

While your argument probably has merit and yes, I agree that ghost heat is a very band-aid approach to the whole thing, I must say... you really like autocannons, don't you?

[Thcucolate]

AUSwarrior24, on 15 June 2014 - 06:35 PM, said:

While your argument probably has merit and yes, I agree that ghost heat is a very band-aid approach to the whole thing, I must say... you really like autocannons, don't you?

Nothing wrong with Autocannon love. I kind of hated them at first. After all, you need to lead your fire, ammo runs out, ammo explosions and so on. But, I then tried a Jagger 2x AC20 and loved it.

Then, I got bored, and decided to go for smaller bore AC. So I went to the far extreme and tried to kit out as many AC2 as possible. And it seems they are double Nerfed. They do not fire fast enough, and even if they did, the whole ghost heat issue has totally killed their relevance in the game.

If you use 2 x AC20, they both take 4 seconds to cycle, and that means heat is not so much of an issue. Firing in chain also works oK. But 2+ AC2s just do not make any sense whatsover. And as one AC2 is just of no relevence, then unless re-balanced, we may as well remove AC2 from the game.

[Sarsaparilla Kid]

You could manually force a faster fire rate by allocating each AC2 to its own button and moving your fingers quickly in sequence, but then you'll run up against the ghost heat penalty, as lacking a 1/2 second window to break the chain of firing multiple instances of the same weapon, the timer never resets and adds extra heat exponentially with every shot until you overheat in about 3 seconds flat. There was a stickied post by a Dev on this timer mechanic and how it affected the AC2, but since they reworked the forums, I think it is in the Archives somewhere. The way they designed the timer for the heat penalty system, which was supposed to address only alpha-firing, conveniently took out the AC2's (or any other weapon, actually) ability to be manually stagger-fired without also triggering the heat penalty.

[Sephlock]

Thcucolate, on 16 June 2014 - 01:37 PM, said:

Nothing wrong with Autocannon love. I kind of hated them at first. After all, you need to lead your fire, ammo runs out, ammo explosions and so on. But, I then tried a Jagger 2x AC20 and loved it.

Then, I got bored, and decided to go for smaller bore AC. So I went to the far extreme and tried to kit out as many AC2 as possible. And it seems they are double Nerfed. They do not fire fast enough, and even if they did, the whole ghost heat issue has totally killed their relevance in the game.

If you use 2 x AC20, they both take 4 seconds to cycle, and that means heat is not so much of an issue. Firing in chain also works oK. But 2+ AC2s just do not make any sense whatsover. And as one AC2 is just of no relevence, then unless re-balanced, we may as well remove AC2 from the game.

More than double. They also got a range nerf, and... didn't they get nerfed a few other times?

[OneEyed Jack]

Yeah, they claim they planned it as a nerf to AC2x4+ that were able to troll bads. Personally, I think it was just badly thought-out code, and they decided to run with it when they saw the results, since it does the exact opposite of what they'd claimed GH would do up until that after-the-fact explanation thread.